Livin’ la vida Local, Part Two

After weeks of late nights, cold pizza, and bad coffee, Yahoo! Local launched earlier today. As one of the members of the Yahoo! Local product team, I can tell you that it’s a really good product (yeah, call me biased, but I know a good thing when I see it :-).

As proud as we all are of our efforts, in my opinion, the release of Yahoo! Local comes down to two things: (1) listening to user feedback and (2) doing something positive with what we heard.

If you read the blogs or boards back in August, you probably know that before the product was ‘Yahoo! Local’ it was ‘Yahoo! Local Beta.’ As a matter of fact, back then Paul mentioned that we were making improvements based on the feedback we’d received from the beta. And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing.

During the beta period, we sifted through thousands of your comments and identified reoccurring themes from user interface issues to content breadth and scope, to relevance improvement suggestions. As a result, we added new features, improved existing ones, and generally fine-tuned the product.

For example, many of you told us that you didn’t like the drop-down menus on the left-hand side of the result page for refining your searches. So, we replaced the drop-downs with clickable links that show the number of results per category next to each link, which many of you suggested as an alternative, and indeed better, design. Another suggestion was clickable headers for sorting Yahoo! Local search results by distance, name, price and rating, which we also added.

We’ve also made many other improvements ‘under the hood’ to make the results more relevant, based in large part on your suggestions for how you would expect and like to see the results displayed. You can find the full list of Yahoo! Local features here.

Many of your comments and suggestions were creative and innovative ideas regarding future enhancements and features. While we’ve implemented several of your ideas, when you add all of them to the long list of enhancements that the Local team has already identified’well, let’s just say we’ll be busy for quite some time to come!

So, on behalf of Yahoo! and the entire Yahoo! Local team, I want to thank you all for your valuable feedback on the Yahoo! Local Beta, and I hope that you enjoy the new Yahoo! Local. We promise to keep listening and improving the product as long as you keep telling us what you think about it. So please continue to send us your feedback and expect Yahoo! Local to get even better because of it.

Ali Diab
Senior Director, Local Products